That’s a tough question! Essentially, you’re saying ‘Here’s a place where you can buy products’ and there’s not a lot of content, or maybe content is duplicated from bunch of places. My short answer is, put on your user hat.
If you type in a product, and you get a ton of places to buy things, and there’s no real information on that page; and there’s no real value add, all you get is places to buy – then you get pretty annoyed. In fact, whenever we ask our users ‘What’s the top issue for you these days?’, it’s less about true web spam like cloaking, hidden text and stuff like that; and more about search quality issue, ‘Oh, I don’t like how many commercial results I see; I get too many products, or too many comparison shopping sites’ and things like that.
That’s something we’ve heard a lot. What you should be asking yourself is ‘Do I want to take that step, do I want to make an ecommerce site if I don’t have a lot of original content or value add, or if I have a lot of duplicate content; or it fits an affiliate feed and there’s not really much else I’m adding to it’.
I’d ask yourself do you really want to jump into that and start optimizing that, or do you want to start looking for something more original, something more compelling, some other hook that you can get a lot of visitors for.
My advice is, if possible, think about how you can move more towards that high value add, unique sort of site, not just a site that somebody might view as cookie cutter, or that they might get annoyed by if they land and find a page that looks just like 500 other pages that they’ve just seen on the web. So those are sort of the things to think about.
Related posts:
- Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites? It does happen for many branded products
- A question to non-intended duplicate content: If an online shop can be reached through several TLDs (like .de, .at, .ch) and the only difference is the currency, (and necessarily the checkout process) does Google consider this duplicate content? What can be done?
- If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?
- How can I make sure that Google reaches and indexes pages that are on a lower (deeper) level of a website?
- When do you reckon Rich Snippets will be made widely available? Can I suggest a tool in Google Webmaster Tools that lets you view (or preview) Rich Snippets from your site?
